Magicjack vs Yahoo Phone

joelpk · Post by **joelpk** » Thu Feb 28, 2008 2:43 am

For the first time, I have been trying MJ and Yahoo Phone Out one after another. I am in the Middle East and liked the idea of using a "real" telephone. At home in the US I have tried only MJ and it never performed well. I thought it might be an ISP problem. Well here in the ME the MJ works terrible - callers complain about drop out and fading. The Yahoo (calling to a US number) always has good voice quality. Sometimes there is a delay, but on the whole it works great.

This seems to rule out computer or ISP problems as the cause.

So..................

1. Any ideas about what I can do

2. Any way to use the MJ with Yahoo so I can have a normal phone.

Thanks in advance

strndedinalska · Post by **strndedinalska** » Thu Feb 28, 2008 4:09 am

If I didn't know better, I'd wonder if there isn't a satellite or a whole slew of hops across the ocean. Given that MagicJack transports mostly over Internet to its destination area then dumps into the telephone line, that may be an issue. Also, what speed are you using. MagicJack works fine from Alaska, which is about as far as many foreign countries. The difference is we dump straight into Seattle (so they say).

Stewart · Post by **Stewart** » Thu Feb 28, 2008 5:34 am

My guess is that your upstream speed is insufficient to support G.711 (used by MJ); Yahoo! uses a compression codec. To confirm, do two tests to Boston at http://www.testyourvoip.com/ . For the first, select Preserve Speech Quality, for the second, Conserve Bandwidth.

You can use MJ with Yahoo!, but you can only use the phone for talking and listening -- you must dial, answer, and hang up with the usual softphone controls. To do this, plug in your MJ. After it shows ready to call, kill the magicjack process with the task manager. Then, start up Yahoo! messenger. Go to Messenger->Preferences. Select the Calling and Audio tab. For both Microphone and Speakers, choose USB Internet Phone by Tiger Jet. Click OK. Make a call. When it connects, pick up phone and talk.

If you want to do this a lot, turn off Autorun, so the MJ software will not start automatically when you plug in the MJ hardware.

joelpk · Post by **joelpk** » Sat Mar 01, 2008 4:37 am

I appreciate all the suggestions. I am in Abu Dhabe and the ISP here blocks a lot of stuff, so I can not run the voiptest. I know that this is aqvery slow connection 256 download.

I like the suggestion about using a regular phone with Yahoo. Can you please tell me how to stop the autorun? I have found the Magicjack.exe and magicjackLoader.exe and figure maybe I should remove them, but I'd like to be sure

Stewart · Post by **Stewart** » Sat Mar 01, 2008 5:10 am

See http://www.annoyances.org/exec/show/article03-018 . Solution 1 is not relevant here, but you can either use tweakui as suggested by solution 2, or edit the registry. That should prevent MJ from starting when you insert the device. But if you reboot your PC with MJ plugged in, it will still start. You can block that by disabling cdloader2, with msconfig, or in the registry. Before doing any of this, you should test Yahoo! with the MJ device (by manually killing the magicjack.exe process as described in previous post) to verify that it works and quality is satisfactory.

It's not surprising that outbound port 5060 is blocked, but I would expect the VoIP test to succeed when it retries on an alternate port. If you can't make that work, run a speed test that will show your upload speed. If it's less than 100 kbps, the remote party will hear poor quality voice.